In Russia as elsewhere, the field of media studies is a new one, not well institutionalized. The selections in the current issue of the Russian Social Science Review are by scholars and specialists from a wide array of backgrounds, assembled here to offer a sampling of work that explores media-related topics. We open the survey with an admonition from the eminent philosopher Vladislav Lektorsky:
Contemporary information technologies, mediating on a massive scale relations between the recipient of information and its source, enormously expand opportunities for manipulating the mind. If a person is exposed to information that pertains to his relations with his immediate milieu, he can always recheck it. It is also possible to adopt a critical attitude toward a text in a book—you can put the book down, go back, read the text again, and reconsider it in the light of your own experience. Yet the words spoken on the TV screen are gone before you can make a rational appraisal of their significance, while the image accompanying them has a suggestive effect that blunts your capacity for critical reflection. Having acquired a mass audience, television largely fabricates the image of reality in the minds of its consumers by imposing a certain interpretation of events and even showing events that did not take place. A person who is plugged into the contemporary system of mass communications is highly susceptible to propaganda influences of any kind.
This observation should be understood along with the fact that the Russian government effectively controls television in the country, and in recent years has expanded its capacity for monitoring and blocking internet activity, to the extent that popular blogs are now required to register with Roskomnadzor, the state body charged with supervising communications.
The articles that follow tour the Russian media landscape. Mikhail M. Nazarov describes media consumption patterns, Lev Gudkov examines the state monopoly over television, and two articles by Andrei Soldatov explain the ways the state is asserting control over the internet. Rounding out the issue are articles on social media as an engine for the dissemination of disinformation and one on the ways that the Web 2.0 is changing the relationship between authors and readers–commenters.
—P.A.K.